TMP-Building.webp

Nadav Soroker/Searchlight New Mexico

MISSING: Accountability at The MASTERS Program

Santa Fe charter high school earned five-year renewal despite red flags about its performance and leadership

by Susanna Space, Searchlight New Mexico

On a sunny Thursday morning last November, parents, students, teachers and administrators filed into Mabry Hall, a large hearing room inside the state education building in downtown Santa Fe. The MASTERS Program (TMP), a charter high school in the city, was up for the renewal of its contract with the state, and members of the Public Education Commission (PEC)—a 10-person elected body that authorizes charter schools in New Mexico—were prepared for a lengthy hearing, the second of two renewal sessions that day.

This was the final step in a monthslong recharter process, and the stakes were high. In the spring of 2024, TMP had been cited by the Public Education Department (PED) for special education failures, and during the 2023–2024 school year, its achievement scores had dropped by 16 percent. While the school had performed well in prior years, documents filed as part of the recharter process showed that it was performing below state-accepted standards in several categories, one of which involved meeting the needs of disabled students.

According to public filings posted on the PED website, Karla Haas Moskowitz—the school’s superintendent and head of school—had resigned in June 2024, just a year after she was hired and a few weeks after the May PED findings were made public. An October email from Fred Harburg, a member of TMP’s governing council (the equivalent of its school board), to other council members and attorney Dan Hill noted that Haas Moskowitz had been allowed to return, but was required to undergo a performance evaluation and maintain “constructive, transparent, respectful, and timely communication” with the council.

First some music, then complaints

The hearing began with a concert: a few staffers and students playing a Welsh folk song for the commissioners. Four school representatives then moved to the front of the room, among them Haas Moskowitz and Kelly Trujillo, an associate dean at Santa Fe Community College—where the school is housed—who was serving as interim governing council president. The school presented a celebratory video of testimonials from students about its supportive environment and customizable curriculum.

About an hour in, a public comment period began—each speaker got two minutes. Most who stood to speak praised the school. A mother of two freshmen expressed gratitude that her kids were getting so many opportunities to pursue their interests. Another parent said that school leaders had gone “above and beyond” for her child. 

The tone shifted when four women stepped up to tell stories of school lapses and conflicts with Haas Moskowitz. First was Kelley Koehler. The parent of a former student and the former secretary of the school’s governing council, she said Haas Moskowitz had disenrolled her daughter in December 2023, after Koehler voted against a bonus for Haas Moskowitz. Next, Kristin Carlisle, a former teacher at the school, accused TMP of legal violations, including financial malfeasance and attempts by Haas Moskowitz to push out special education students. Like Koehler, she said Haas Moskowitz had tried to intimidate and silence her, accusing her of fraud and locking her out of her online account with the school after she called attention to special education problems.

“Retaliation at TMP is targeted at those who expose its failures,” Carlisle told the commissioners.

Another parent, Keren James, spoke next, claiming that the school withheld special education services from her son, Gryffen, throughout the 2023–24 school year. She informed the commissioners of her intention to file a complaint with the state, which she did two weeks later. Hers would be the second set of special education allegations lodged against the school in less than a year. 

The last to speak was Diana Boyd. A 30-year-veteran math teacher with a doctorate, she, along with Carlisle, had filed the first special education complaint. As Boyd began to speak, she and Trujillo seemed to look at each other. Because of her complaint, Boyd claimed, “I was immediately forced out of my job” by TMP’s leadership. In closing, she questioned whether the governing council was “up to the task of necessary oversight.” 

In October, Carslile and Boyd had filed a joint whistleblower lawsuit against the school, a civil action in Santa Fe’s First Judicial Court, asserting that Haas Moskowitz had attempted to expel students with disabilities. The lawsuit alleges that they had both been retaliated against when they attempted to bring problems with special education to light. (Haas Moskowitz declined repeated requests for an interview.)

The commissioners asked no questions about the suit. They mentioned the first special education complaint, which, in May, resulted in findings of violations of state and federal laws that required corrective action by the school. They also spoke of serious concerns about student performance—which one commissioner called “alarming”—and high board turnover, which Steven Carrillo, the commissioner charged with direct oversight of TMP, called “the biggest red flag we see.”

Yet the PEC approved the school’s charter that day for five more years, without any conditions. Despite the recent lawsuit, documented violations of special education law, failures to meet standards set forth by the commission itself and the pleadings of teachers and parents to delay or apply conditions to the renewal, TMP had aced the test.

“Go to the police”

Long before the November hearing, James, a single parent who works long hours as a financial advisor, felt defeated. She had lost nearly a year of her son’s schooling when TMP’s staff delayed special education services for him—services that the school is required by law to deliver. She blamed TMP, but she also blamed herself for not having the wherewithal to challenge the administration sooner.

“Right up until the end [of the 2023–24 school year], my emails were extremely civil,” she told me. “I was trying to maintain open lines of communication.” One of her chief complaints was that the school had repeatedly postponed creating an Individualized Education Program (IEP) for her son. IEPs, well-known tools that are fundamental to educating children with disabilities, are created by schools in collaboration with parents, students and teachers. They lay out various ways that the student will be accommodated. 

After the November 2024 hearing, James was so outraged by the school’s path to another five years of public funding that she filed her complaint. In January, investigators from the PED sent her a 22-page report. They found that TMP had denied her son what the law entitles all public school students to have regardless of disabilities: a free and appropriate education. The report charged the school with 11 violations of federal and state special education laws, concluding that TMP had failed in several ways to provide appropriate services to James’ son.

According to the state, the school failed to identify Gryffen for services, even though it was clear he needed to be evaluated, and it also failed to perform a comprehensive evaluation of his educational needs—both actions are required by law. When the school did provide special education services, staff members fell short of the credentials they needed.

The school also violated Gryffen’s confidentiality when it posted a list of students receiving special education on its public website. The state’s report called for seven categories of action to be completed by June 15, including for Haas Moskowitz to meet with the state to review the findings; for TMP special education staff to receive coaching; and for the school to revise its special education policies.

Carlisle, too, was furious when the renewal was approved without any conditions. After the November charter renewal hearing, she approached Carrillo in a parking lot outside Mabry Hall and asked how he and his colleagues could approve TMP’s charter when there were so many problems. 

“She was really angry with me,” Carrillo recalled. Carlisle reiterated her concerns about how the school was using public funds—and about the retaliation she’d experienced. 

Carrillo mentioned attorney Dan Hill, and Carlisle remembers Carrillo saying that Hill would be “all over” the PEC if they applied conditions or denied the charter. 

When I asked Carrillo about this exchange, he said that lawsuits are not uncommon among parents, teachers and schools. If the PEC had denied the recharter, or put conditions on its approval, Hill would likely have sued it for acting in an arbitrary and capricious manner.

I asked if he knew about the PED findings at the time of the May hearing; he said he wasn’t sure. He wasn’t sure he’d been informed about the whistleblower lawsuit, either. If he had known about the allegations, though, it wouldn’t have made a difference in the renewal process. “Anyone can file a lawsuit against anybody,” he said.

In the parking lot that day, Carrillo tried to appease Carlisle. It wasn’t the first time he’d spoken with her—she had appealed to him months before, seeking his help with her concerns about the school. He repeated what he’d told her then: If something criminal were going on at the school, she should go to the police. He also suggested that she reach out to the media with her allegations. 

Carlisle was appalled. “I’m a teacher asking for help with law violations,” she told me in January. “And he’s saying, ‘Why don’t you tell the press?’”

Letting things slip

Like many charter schools across the country, TMP owes its existence to an inspired founder with high ideals, career success and little experience with public education. In the mid-2000s, John Bishop, a technology executive whose company, Norsam Technologies, specializes in ion-beam technology used to create markings on gemstones for the diamond behemoth DeBeers, conceived of a high school that would offer accelerated learning to students while allowing them to earn up to two years worth of college credits before graduation. A letter from Bishop—in which he repeatedly invokes “freedom” as a primary benefit of a TMP education—still appears in the school’s handbook.

The original charter application outlined a detailed plan, which included offering dual-credit classes to the school’s 120 students through Santa Fe Community College, and which contained a description of its approach to special education. During the four-year period leading up to the November 2024 hearing, the student body rose to 250.

According to the renewal application, the school’s total operational funding revenue had more than doubled between 2021 and 2024, when it reported more than $5 million in revenue. Administration costs jumped from $166,000 to nearly $500,000 during that time, representing 12 percent of the school’s overall budget (versus 8 percent in 2021). Guidelines for TMP’s head of school salary from 2020–21 show that the school offered $109,000 annual salaries for those with 25 years of experience. In the spring of 2024, Haas Moskowitz was earning $145,000.

While many charters, including TMP, do a good job of serving most students, they’re often criticized for cherry-picking higher-achieving students, taking them out of public schools and then boasting about the charters’ higher test scores and graduation rates. These practices, critics say, can make schools look more successful than they would be if every type of student were represented equally, as they are in public schools.

Like most charter advocates, Carrillo disagrees with this characterization. As he told SFR last June, when he was running, unopposed, for re-election: “[Charter students] are all public school kids, and they’re all getting money from the same pot.”

Many public education advocates object to what they see as exclusionary practices when it comes to who charter schools serve. To enroll in most charters requires entering lotteries—a process that creates barriers for kids whose parents are less engaged with their education. Many charters across the U.S. have been shuttered by state oversight boards after they’ve siphoned millions of dollars in state funding to pay for the relatively high salaries of school leaders.

When it comes to special education, problems abound across the country in many public K-12 settings. “I see a number of schools accidentally let things slip” on their obligations to students with disabilities, Carillo said of the schools he oversees in the state’s District 10, which includes schools in Santa Fe, Española and Taos. “It may be because, administratively, they didn’t have somebody focusing enough attention or time on IEPs. That’s the fault of the administrator in that school.”

According to Gail Stewart, a lawyer in Albuquerque who has represented many parents like James, problems are widespread here. And they go far deeper than what Carillo describes.

“Federal [special education] law contemplates that there’s going to be more infrastructure than exists in New Mexico,” she said. “Various efforts have been made to try to get the Public Education Department to be more responsive, and to take their job more seriously when it comes to enforcement of IDEA,” she added, referring to a federal law called the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act.

New Mexico isn’t the only place that has problems meeting its obligations. While states largely have control over how their education systems work, special education is one area where federal protection plays a significant role in enforcing equality for students with disabilities. After the recent dismantling of the U.S. Department of Education and the transfer of special education oversight to the Department of Health and Human Services, kids like Gryffen are even more vulnerable to having their educational rights denied.

Missing documents, making do 

Soon after Kelley Koehler’s daughter Sachi began the 2023–2024 school year at TMP, Koehler was invited to join the school’s governing council. She was elected to serve as secretary—and there was paperwork for her to do, which included tracking who on the council needed training required by state law. By mid-October, she was calling the education department with questions.

“I’m the secretary, and I don’t even know what paperwork I’m supposed to be doing, because I haven’t even had my board training,” Koehler told me. Other council members needed to get up to speed, too. “There were several people who didn’t have board training,” she said.

Meanwhile, as James waited for the school to start the IEP process, Gryffen’s health was declining—he suffered from an autoimmune illness, chronic fatigue syndrome and anxiety—making it harder for him to get to classes. She began discussing whether Gryffen could receive instruction at home. 

IEPs were also of concern to Boyd and Carlisle. Boyd found that her emailed questions about student IEPs didn’t always get a response from the director of special education, who was new to the job that year. Boyd knew that such challenges come with the territory, and she knew how to be resourceful when necessary. She also admired Haas Moskowitz’s interest in innovative ideas about education, and she felt encouraged when Haas Moskowitz recommended A Hidden Wholeness—a groundbreaking 2004 book by Parker J. Palmer, an American educator who emphasizes the idea of teaching as transformation and the role of community in education. So she made do with the spotty IEP access, recalling what she could from her work with students in previous years. 

Carlisle felt the lack of access to IEPs more keenly, though. She recalled the expertise of the school’s previous special education director—as well as her time at another school, where teachers were required to sign off on hard copies. 

“This was not that at all,” she said. “I started to figure out on my own that I had students who were gifted—or who, I thought, needed accommodations.”

When Carlisle asked Christopher De Jesus, the school’s director of special education, for guidance in accessing her students’ IEPs, he referred her to PowerSchool, an online tool teachers use to post assignments and communicate outside the classroom. But neither she nor Boyd could locate the documents. At one point, De Jesus posted them on the school’s Google Drive, but the information was piecemeal. Boyd was so familiar with the students, she found herself actually helping De Jesus identify who was missing from the files. At one point, Boyd said, another teacher called the PED for guidance on how to locate the documents. According to Boyd, that teacher was later reprimanded by Haas Moskowitz for making the lack of organization known to the state.

“Teetering on noncompliance”

As winter break approached, James still lacked an IEP for Gryffen. Around that time, Carlisle sent an email to her colleagues, including Haas Moskowitz, about a female student who she found withdrawn and uncooperative. Carlisle was really struggling, and she was seeking support from her colleagues. Haas Moskowitz replied, copying De Jesus, saying that she was writing in order to determine “what kind of services [the student] needs and whether or not we can serve her.”

That confused Carlisle. Wasn’t the school required to serve all students? She said as much in her reply, and asked if she was missing something. She included a link to a website explaining the obligations of charter schools to serve all kids. 

Haas Moskowitz sent back a lengthy message. She lamented the challenges posed by the state’s mandate that charters serve all kids. “A school significantly increases its liability when it enrolls a student that it does not have the capacity to serve,” she wrote. She said both the lottery process and the state’s laws were “tricky” because they didn’t let the school talk with families about children who were enrolling and the accommodations they might need. Haas Moskowitz went on to say that, while TMP had been successful for some students, the school was “teetering on noncompliance” with others. “The school was created as Early College, so the curriculum and instruction is very traditional. … To serve students with disabilities a very different model is needed.”

The next day, Carlisle got a terse email from Haas Moskowitz saying she was needed at a meeting. Carlisle felt nervous: Had she done something wrong in challenging the head of school? 

According to the whistleblower lawsuit later filed by Carlisle, the meeting was attended by Haas Moskowitz; Steve Stauss, who was then president of the governing council; and Tina Morris, then the assistant head of school. Stauss attended by phone, and Carlisle remembers Morris taking notes. According to the lawsuit, Haas Moskowitz opened with an accusation. “She told me that my colleagues had been collecting a file on me about fraud I had been committing,” Carlisle said. 

Carlisle’s mind raced. She had invited poets and filmmakers to her classroom and had taken students on field trips, sometimes using grant money to pay for expenses. Had she messed up an invoice? As an English teacher, she had no interaction with the school’s finances.

The conversation then turned to the student who was the subject of the emails. According to the whistleblower complaint, Stauss reprimanded Carlisle for stating what she knew to be true: that the law required the school to serve all students. According to the lawsuit, he told her to “eat humble pie” and recognize that she’d been arrogant. 

“I don’t remember anyone actually talking about the student herself,” Carlisle later recalled. 

“I’ve worked for two members of Congress,” Carlisle told me recently. “I have a background in public policy. I went into this doing my research and feeling that I’m an educated person with a voice. And this man told me that I was arrogant to think I could ever understand the law.” 

When I asked attorney Gail Stewart how the head of a charter school could miss the point of federal and state special education laws, and instead look for ways to shed children they don’t wish to serve, she told me that happens all the time. “Sometimes [the charter schools’] naivete and lack of knowing what they’re doing make them more inclined to state stuff openly that other, more seasoned, charter schools and districts may hide,” she said.

Retaliation and a bonus 

At the governance council meeting in the fall of 2023, where Koehler and other council members were asked to vote on a 10 percent bonus for Haas Moskowitz, Koehler was the only vote against the payout among six council members. 

The next afternoon, Koehler got an email from Haas Moskowitz. The subject line said “Disenrollment.” Sachi, Koehler’s daughter, did not meet the required credits for enrollment at TMP, Haas Moskowitz wrote, and therefore should never have been admitted. “You will need to make other arrangements for schooling for the Spring 2024 semester,” she wrote. The message said that Stauss had “directed me to facilitate this action of disenrollment.” 

Koehler was shocked. Questions had come up before about Sachi’s credits. She had come from a Waldorf School, where grade levels were more flexible. But the timing and abruptness of this message seemed suspicious. She reached out to the governing council. Would her daughter really be discharged? Stauss wrote that he was not involved in operational matters, despite Haas Moskowitz referencing him in her message. Like Carlisle, Koehler felt sure this was retaliation.

Meanwhile, the fall semester was ending, and Gryffen still didn’t have an IEP. A December message from De Jesus about scheduling a meeting in January didn’t acknowledge the many months that had passed or offer any apology or remedy for the delay. To make matters worse, when James met with the school in January, there still wasn’t an IEP. Equally frustrating, James noticed that Gryffen’s teachers didn’t seem to have any understanding as to why he was missing classes—or that he needed their help to keep up.

“The teachers were completely unaware,” James told me in February, exasperated that Gryffen’s teachers hadn’t been informed about his needs. “They were still speaking to him like, ‘Oh, you’re just out for a couple of days with the flu.’”

Around the time of James’ January meeting with the school, Haas Moskowitz suggested in another internal email that the school may not be up to serving its students. Carlisle again spoke up on behalf of the kids, citing the school’s legal responsibility to serve everyone. At that point, Carlisle called Carrillo, who listened to her complaints but took no action. Boyd’s concerns deepened, too, after she was unable to find student IEPs while preparing for meetings with parents. When she located the documents, she saw that they hadn’t been updated by De Jesus. According to the whistleblower complaint, Boyd emailed Haas Moskowitz about her concerns, including a concern that De Jesus might need additional training. 

In February, Boyd alerted Stauss to the problems and continued to remind Haas Moskowitz about the special education lapses, including that they were not limited to IEPs. Days after one of those emails, Haas Moskowitz put Boyd on administrative leave. According to the school’s response to the whistleblower lawsuit, this decision resulted from a poor performance review. 

Boyd believed the move was retaliatory. She and Carlisle spoke, then, on March 6, filed a formal joint complaint to the PED about the problems with special education at TMP. The school received the complaint on a Friday. The following Monday, Carlisle, who needed to use PowerSchool to enter grades, found that she’d been locked out of TMP’s network.

“Alarming” findings 

It took TMP until April to complete an evaluation of Gryffen, and when his IEP finally came through in May, the school year was nearly over. That month, the PED responded to Boyd and Carslile’s complaint with two findings that required corrective action—the same findings that Carrillo said he wasn’t sure he knew about when it came time to consider rechartering TMP. According to PED, the school had violated state and federal laws by failing to implement IEPs; by failing to make them available to teachers; and by failing to inform teachers of their responsibilities to accommodate those students. 

By the time James filed her PED complaint, Gryffen had enrolled at another school and was doing better. When the state’s response came by email a few weeks later, James was at work. She initially only glanced at it, afraid to look. When she finally opened the report, she said, “I saw ‘corrective action, corrective action.’ I went through the rest of my day in disbelief.” 

The following Thursday, TMP’s governing council held a special meeting. Kelly Trujillo—who, for months, has been serving in an interim role as president of the council, wasn’t present, but Haas Moskowitz was there, along with attorney Dan Hill. After an hour and a half in a closed-door session, the meeting adjourned. No actions were taken.

Haas Moskowitz continues to lead the school. When I reached out to Trujillo about the report, he merely indicated that the governing council was aware of the findings and was working to carry out the requirements of the PED.

Carrillo and I spoke a few days after the report about Gryffen was issued. He said he had no knowledge of the new findings. When I told him they listed 11 violations of state and federal special education laws, he said he found that “alarming.” He said he would reach out to the PED to find out what was going on.

Later, in an email response to Carrillo, Charter Schools Division Director Corina Chavez responded that she had updated an internal tracking form with the information, and that if commissioners were interested in learning about PED corrective action plans, she could provide those in their monthly meetings. Commissioner Timothy Beck also responded, forwarding Carrillo and other commissioners an email James had sent to him earlier that week, attaching the report in an effort to at last get the commissioners’ attention. “I don’t really know why this was sent to me,” Beck wrote.

Passing the buck

Even at schools with ample resources, educating all students is difficult. There’s no question that TMP, along with most of the state’s other charter schools, is offering excellent services to many kids. But any educator will tell you that providing a good education to some children isn’t the hard part. Schools that rely on public funding to operate are required to deliver equal access to every child, regardless of disabilities. Figuring out how to serve all students equally is one of the greatest challenges such schools face.

Haas Moskowitz wasn’t necessarily wrong in asserting that her school lacked adequate resources to do its job. According to the state, her staff wasn’t qualified to carry out what the state required of them—work that is nuanced and complex. “[Schools] also need technical assistance as to how they meet some kids’ needs,” Gail Stewart told me.

According to Carrillo, it’s not the PEC’s job to validate complaints like the ones he heard from Carlisle and Koehler. Charter school oversight begins with the school’s governing council before the PED gets involved. Until the PED decides a complaint is valid, Carillo says, it’s out of his hands. “I’m empathetic,” he told me of the struggles the parents and teachers have had with TMP. “I hear what they’re saying and going through. But we don’t intervene.”

The state findings on James’ case buoyed her spirits, but they don’t make the road ahead any easier. In other states, failures like the ones she endured can result in an award of tuition to a private school—a high cost that works to incentivize the state to enforce special education laws properly. “We don’t have anything like that,” Stewart says. 

As the whistleblower lawsuit continues, Boyd has had to take a different job, now teaching at a college. The black mark she received by being dismissed from TMP may make it impossible for her to go back to teaching high school. Carlisle had to find another job, too. 

All four women wonder why the body tasked with accountability over TMP failed to use its power to help them—and why, in a public hearing on renewing the school’s contract for state funding, critical issues were glossed over. Carrillo regards the conversations he had with Carlisle and James over that winter as just another day in the life of a charter school commissioner.

Koehler, however, vividly remembers the one she had with Carrillo following Sachi’s disenrollment. Before they hung up, the commissioner had a question: When election time came, could he count on her vote?

Republished with permission from Searchlight New Mexico, a nonprofit, nonpartisan media organization that seeks to empower New Mexicans to demand honest and effective public policy.